The Minority New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Parliament has painted a gloomy picture of the country�s educational system, stressing that the deterioration in the educational sector had resulted in students resorting to examination malpractices at all levels to secure their future.
The minority cited massive examination malpractices, unpaid teachers� salaries, huge arrears in capitation grants and GETFund, lack of basic teaching materials like chalk and notebooks, inability of government to provide subventions to the second cycle and tertiary institutions and general neglect of education as some setbacks to education.
According to the NPP, despite the general falling standard of education under the current National Democratic Congress (NDC) government, cost of education has conversely shot up astronomically, making it difficult for the average Ghanaian child to access education.
The minority made the observation at a press conference in Accra yesterday to draw the government�s attention to the worrying situation in the educational sector.
The minority spokesperson on education, Prof Dominic Fobih, who addressed the press conference, said that under the NPP administration, some initiatives were taken � including a four-year senior high school (SHS) system and introduction of capitation grant � to help improve the standard of education, but the ruling NDC did not see any wisdom in that and for political propaganda, cancelled all those �rich� ideas introduced by the NPP.
�The major source for financing the education sector is seriously depleted, starved of statutory funds and weakened to its knees,� Prof Fobih noted, stressing that the GETfund is denied funds which is seriously affecting the quality of education in the country.
�Currently, the 2015 allocation to the GETFund is in arrears, SHS students� subsidy for feeding is always in arrears for months and heads of public senior high schools have to threaten closing down schools before portions are released to them,� Prof Fobih said. He added that the capitation grant for basic schools is also in arrears for one academic year.
The minority NPP emphasised that the reduction of the duration of the SHS system from four years to three years had created a huge backlog of SHS leavers waiting to access university education, stressing that the situation would even worsen in the 2016/2017 academic year when those who started with the last batch of the four-year system would have come out.
�In the 2013 calendar year, there were 240,000 regular SHS leavers waiting for admission into the tertiary institutions; and this number has increased to 649,000 because of the double exit,� the minority noted.
Prof Fobih posited that when the NPP exited office in 2009, students in the public universities were paying GH�258 for humanities, GH�299 for administration or science and GH�355 for applied sciences; but currently under the NDC administration, students are paying GH�2,168 for humanities, GH�2,496 for administration or science and GH�2,696 for applied sciences.
�The NDC promised to eliminate 60 percent of identified schools under trees, provide decent facilities for all rural schools, ensure 100% access for all school-going age, provide quality education at both basic and secondary levels, work to attain universal access to secondary school education by constructing 200 new community day senior high schools, establish 10 new colleges of education, mobilise resources to expand and improve the quality of the school feeding programme and review the capitation grant to better fulfill the constitutional imperative of the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education, but it has woefully failed in fulfilling these mouth-watering promises,� the minority said, stressing that Ghanaians must vote the NDC out in 2016 to save the nation�s education.
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